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The U.S. Department of the Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) on Tuesday removed three individuals linked to the Intellexa Consortium, the holding company behind a commercial spyware known as Predator , from the specially designated nationals list. The names of the individuals are as follows - Merom Harpaz Andrea Nicola Constantino Hermes Gambazzi Sara Aleksandra Fayssal Hamou Hamou was sanctioned by OFAC in March 2024, and Harpaz and Gambazzi were targeted in September 2024 in connection with developing, operating, and distributing Predator. The Treasury's press release does not give any reason as to why they were removed from the list. However, in a statement shared with Reuters, it said the removal "was done as part of the normal administrative process in response to a petition request for reconsideration." The department added that the individuals had "demonstrated measures to separate themselves from the Intellexa Consortium....

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) added a security flaw impacting Digiever DS-2105 Pro network video recorders (NVRs) to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities ( KEV ) catalog, citing evidence of active exploitation. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2023-52163 (CVSS score: 8.8), relates to a case of command injection that allows post-authentication remote code execution. "Digiever DS-2105 Pro contains a missing authorization vulnerability which could allow for command injection via time_tzsetup.cgi," CISA said. The addition of CVE-2023-52163 to the KEV catalog comes in the multiple reports from Akamai and Fortinet about the exploitation of the flaw by threat actors to deliver botnets like Mirai and ShadowV2 . According to TXOne Research security researcher Ta-Lun Yen, the vulnerability, alongside an arbitrary file read bug (CVE-2023-52164, CVSS score: 5.1), remains unpatched due to the device reaching end-of-life (EoL) status. Successfu...

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on Monday announced a ban on all drones and critical components made in a foreign country, citing national security concerns. To that end, the agency has added to its Covered List Uncrewed aircraft systems (UAS) and UAS critical components produced in a foreign country, and all communications and video surveillance equipment and services pursuant to the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act ( NDAA ). This move will keep China-made drones such as those from DJI and Autel Robotics out of the U.S. market. The FCC said that while drones offer the potential to enhance public safety and innovation, criminals, hostile foreign actors, and terrorists can weaponize them to present serious threats to the U.S. It also noted that a further review by an Executive Branch interagency body with appropriate national security expertise that was convened by the White House led to a "specific determination" that UAS and UAS critical compon...

A Google Chrome extension with a "Featured" badge and six million users has been observed silently gathering every prompt entered by users into artificial intelligence (AI)-powered chatbots like OpenAI ChatGPT, Anthropic Claude, Microsoft Copilot, DeepSeek, Google Gemini, xAI Grok, Meta AI, and Perplexity. The extension in question is Urban VPN Proxy , which has a 4.7 rating on the Google Chrome Web Store. It's advertised as the "best secured Free VPN access to any website, and unblock content." Its developer is a Delaware-based company named Urban Cyber Security Inc . On the Microsoft Edge Add-ons marketplace, it has 1.3 million installations .  Despite claiming that it allows users to "protect your online identity, stay protected, and hide your IP," an update was pushed to users on July 9, 2025, when version 5.5.0 was released with the AI data harvesting enabled by default using hard-coded settings. Specifically, this is achieved by means of a t...

A human rights lawyer from Pakistan's Balochistan province received a suspicious link on WhatsApp from an unknown number, marking the first time a civil society member in the country was targeted by Intellexa's Predator spyware, Amnesty International said in a report. The link, the non-profit organization said, is a "Predator attack attempt based on the technical behaviour of the infection server, and on specific characteristics of the one-time infection link which were consistent with previously observed Predator 1-click links." Pakistan has dismissed the allegations, stating "there is not an iota of truth in it." The findings come from a new joint investigation published in collaboration with Israeli newspaper Haaretz, Greek news site Inside Story, and Swiss tech site Inside IT. It's based on documents and other materials leaked from the company, including internal documents, sales and marketing material, and training videos. Intellexa is the mak...